


i'll know how much you know

by stiction



Series: Prowl Week 2020 [4]
Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One), Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Loadbearer!Prowl, M/M, Tactile Sexual Interfacing, Touch-Starved
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-23
Updated: 2020-04-23
Packaged: 2021-03-01 19:55:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,987
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23792704
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stiction/pseuds/stiction
Summary: Everyone's form serves a function. Prowl's form serves its function well.The outer one does, at least.It keeps him safe.---Prowl Week Day Four: Sensory
Relationships: Jazz/Prowl
Series: Prowl Week 2020 [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1709950
Comments: 9
Kudos: 133
Collections: Prowl Week





	i'll know how much you know

“Huh.”

“Is there a problem?” 

“Problem isn’t the word I’d use, precisely.” Ratchet scooted back on his stool and fixed his gaze on Prowl’s. His hands were streaked with energon. Not nearly as much as Prowl had expected, somehow. It was always complicated to project how much one would lose. “Who else knows?”

Prowl didn’t bother feigning innocence. “Nobody. Now you, I suppose.”

“You suppose.” Ratchet repeated with a sigh. “Yeah. I _suppose_ too.”

He was glad, then, of the extra safeguard against his sudden urge to fidget. His hands were still at his sides and his face, he knew, revealed little. A perk of subpar construction.

“Are you going to tell Optimus?” he asked. 

Ratchet watched him closely. Then he leaned against the workbench behind him. He moved to cross his arms and then stopped, seemingly remembering that his hands were dirty. “I don’t really see how it’s any of Optimus’ business,” he said at last. He was frowning, but Prowl was reasonably sure that it was mostly about his dirty hands. There was no point in washing them now, when the planes of Prowl’s chassis were still buckled and bent. 

“How did you know?” 

Ratchet raised his brows, then lowered them, perplexed. “I’d say it’s more of a question of how I didn’t know until now. As soon as I hooked up the medscanner, there it was. Clear as quartz.” 

He met Prowl’s gaze and shrugged. 

“And now I know.”

* * *

“They’re not sensitive.” 

Jazz stopped. His fingers, still curled around the joint of a doorwing, twitched. Even with his visor on, Prowl clocked the skeptical shift of his gaze. 

“I’m serious,” he said. “Don’t take it personally.” 

Jazz tweaked the cable that fed the hydraulic pressure one more time and, seeing the lack of reaction, finally let go. 

“Alright,” he said. “How about you show me a sweeter spot, then?”

He let Prowl take his wrists, guide his hands to the sides of Prowl’s chassis, the places where his armor was thin, where pressure was more likely to transfer through to his true frame. He shivered a little as Jazz’s fingers dipped into his vents. It tugged on a long-hidden nerve cluster that made him lean closer and mouth at the curve of Jazz’s jaw. It was easy to coax charge out of Jazz’s frame. Simply kissing him made his engine switch gears. He was jealous, then, a lingering tightness in his tanks that had him taking Jazz’s face in his hands and deepening their kiss.

“Harder,” he said, and Jazz obliged. 

His array was more sensitive than his plating, at least. It probably didn’t compare to his irreducible form, but it had been so long since he’d acquired the armor that it was difficult to remember. He had never stripped down with Tumbler, and was glad for it now. It would have been a mistake—an easily exploited weakness.

It wasn’t necessary, in any case. He could overload with time and focus, two things Jazz inexplicably proved time and time again that he was willing to give.

* * *

Bumblebee whistled. “Jeez, Prowl. You look… well, you look like you got hit by a truck.”

“Hilarious,” Prowl said as he limped past him and headed toward the medbay. “But it was a tank.”

“Wait!” He was stopped by a hand on his arm. Bumblebee took another look at his frame, the stress fractures and the huge dent in the center of his bumper, and winced. “You’re really okay? That looks like it hurts.”

“I’ll be fine,” Prowl said. “I’m heading straight to Ratchet.”

Unfortunately, as soon as Ratchet plugged him into the medscanner, he said: “Huh.”

“You know I hate hearing that sound.”

“You’re gonna hate what I say next more.”

Prowl waited for Ratchet to continue. He kept waiting as Ratchet coiled the cord for the medscanner around his hand and rose to put it back into the cabinet, until he realized that Ratchet was giving them both a moment. That whatever he was about to say was going to cost Prowl dearly. 

By the time he turned around, resigned, Prowl understood. 

“It’s only a day or two,” Ratchet said. “You’re lucky I have the materials to fix this out here. I can play it off to the others, at least. Mandatory berth rest.”

“Okay,” Prowl said, though he already felt dizzy. His HUD flickered with a warning about system stress.

“I need you out of there before I can figure out the problem and fix it.”

“Okay,” Prowl said. He could work from his habsuite. It was mostly an office already. He could hide it. He’d been hiding it for, what? Almost the entirety of his life?

A day or two would be nothing, he told himself as he guided Ratchet through the dismantling of his shell. It came off piece by piece, and each new part of his body prickled as it was exposed. His internal sensornet, so long unused, sprang eagerly back to life when the last segment of armor fell into Ratchet’s hands. 

His HUD was flooded with reports about the texture of the berth, about the medical smell of Ratchet and the surgery bay, about the airflow around and through his frame that brushed against wires that hadn’t felt a breeze in millennia, wires that he had forgotten _had_ sensory feedback. 

Ratchet was talking to him. He tuned into his audio memory. 

“How’re you holding up?” Ratchet had asked. It had been drowned out by the overwhelming feeling of Ratchet’s hand on his thin shoulder. 

“Fine,” he said. His vocalizer was steady. “I’ll be fine.”

Ratchet gave him the go-ahead once he confirmed that the hallways were empty. 

He was sure with each of the twenty mechanometers between the medbay and his quarters that someone was about to turn the corner and see him. The only thing stopping him from sprinting was the wall of data he received from simply walking. Static airflow had been bad enough. This was worse. 

But nobody did pass him.

The lock on his door still recognized his biosign. He stepped inside, relieved as the door slid shut behind him, and stopped.

“Hey,” Jazz said. He was sitting in the chair in front of Prowl’s desk, his feet kicked up as he scrolled through a datapad. “Hope you don’t mind me dropping in. Bee said you were roughed up pretty bad. Thought I’d come make sure you weren’t about to join the Well myself.”

Prowl’s servos had frozen. There was a gap of two, maybe three astroseconds in which he might have been able to slip back out the door. It would take some explaining, but it was better than— better than— His processor stuttered. He could feel Jazz’s EM field clear across the room, radiating curiosity and a comfortable care. 

Jazz was going to turn and look at him at any moment. 

Had he been missing that this entire time? He’d never been able to read anything clearly off of anyone’s field, even Jazz’s. Only the rise and fall of frequency correlating with energy expenditure. He felt the moment concern spiked, the instant Jazz felt that something was wrong. 

“You okay?” Jazz said, and then that rapidly closing window of time slammed shut, and Prowl was left standing there under Jazz’s blank stare. He felt smaller than he ever had in Petrex at the thunk of Jazz’s feet falling to the ground. 

And then the shock and worry bled out of his field. 

“Hey, Prowler,” Jazz said.

* * *

“You knew,” Prowl said, a few minutes later. He’d gotten a cube of energon and sat down at his desk and kept a careful bubble of space between them, and now he was doing his best to avoid having a processor meltdown over the fact that Jazz was acting like Prowl being two-thirds of his normal size and devoid of almost all kibble was normal. It didn't help that he was also trying to pretend that the taste of regular energon wasn’t making his chemoreceptors light up like sabot rounds. 

Jazz at least had the decency to avoid looking smug. “Wouldn’t say I, y’know, _knew_. Not exactly the first place a mech’s mind goes. But I figured somethin’ was up.”

“Right,” Prowl conceded. He had so thoroughly lost the upper hand that his tacnet had, by and large, given up. Normally he had a couple micrometers on Jazz. Now he was sitting across the room, behind a desk that was far too big for his irreducible form, all in order to avoid having to crane his neck to look at Jazz’s face. “What gave it away?”

The tension in Jazz’s smile hadn’t fully faded, but the sly tilt of his head was familiar. “Never met a Praxian who didn’t like a back massage.”

Prowl covered his face with his hands. He was unused to the level of control required for his true face. The shell, less sensitive, less emotive, made things much simpler. He listened as Jazz stepped closer. The deliberate sound of his feet on the floor embarrassed Prowl. Jazz was coddling him, making sure he knew where Jazz was because he expected, at any moment, for Prowl to tell him to stop. 

He couldn’t blame Jazz for thinking he would, either. The feedback loop from putting his hands on his face was acutely consuming. His palms and fingers reported the smoothness of his face, the dips of his optics and the ridge of his nose, and all the while the sensors on his cheeks and his lips buzzed with the pressure. 

“Prowl?” 

“Yes?” Talking against his hands tickled his sensornet, too.

“Can I touch you?”

Prowl hesitated. “My armor shell won’t be repaired for at least a day.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“Fine,” Prowl snapped, dropping his hands to the desk. His anger faded when the hum of Jazz’s field rose again in his awareness, replacing the recursive loop. “Yes,” he said, softer. 

Jazz slid onto the desk and reached to cup Prowl’s jaw in his hand. He moved so slowly that Prowl’s impatience won out. He leaned to meet Jazz’s touch and was still, somehow, surprised by it. It felt entirely different to his own hand. Jazz’s paint was rougher with use, the hinges and joints slightly looser. He pressed further into it. Jazz chuckled and held him tighter, and Prowl tipped his head back at the first gentle nudge. 

His optics had dimmed on their own accord. His priority tree cycled through a handful of high-profile databursts: Jazz’s hand on him. The field that encircled him, bleeding fondness. A proximity alert for Jazz’s other hand, which came to rest on the side of his neck, helping to cradle his helm. Charge welled to meet Jazz’s fingertips, arcing in the space between his joints. 

It peaked at last when Jazz leaned down. The proximity alert tripped sensors all the way down Prowl's chassis before it narrowed in to the brush of Jazz’s lips against his. 

Prowl made a noise, surely something undignified, let his jaw drop so the touch turned into a genuine kiss. He shivered at the interested pulse in Jazz’s field. That, too, he had missed that, too, every time. What an inconceivable loss. His hands came up to grip Jazz’s wrists, holding him close. The moment he felt Jazz smile against his mouth, his charge crested in a dizzying crackle. 

He held on as it dissipated, half into Jazz’s frame and half grounding in his chair. Dimly he realized that Jazz was laughing. He didn’t have a chance to feel embarrassed. Jazz kissed him again, lighter this time, and grinned. 

“You just overloaded from a kiss,” Jazz said. 

“Uh-huh,” Prowl mumbled. It was difficult, still, to string his thoughts together. 

Jazz’s thumbs stroked his cheeks. “Wanna see if you can do it again?”

“Uh-huh,” Prowl mumbled again, turning to kiss the join of Jazz’s fingers to his hand. “I do.”

**Author's Note:**

> ratchet, a day later: oh hey, i replaced the faulty wiring in the armor while i was at it. you should have normal sensory range now  
> prowl: ...oh no  
> jazz: ;*
> 
> title from [ 'the touch me' by the blow](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzjYBUb5ddE)


End file.
